One Flesh (1966) by Elizabeth Jennings : A critical analysis

In  the poem “One Flesh” Jennings explores the withering nature of relationship between an ageing couple. It includes in her poetic Anthology ‘The Mind Has Mountains’. Jennings prospects the nature of marriage relationship in old age and we come to know towards the end of the poem that she is talking about the personal relationship of her parents.

The title of the poem has a Biblical reference. When a couple is combined in marriage they become one flesh. The word ‘one’ suggests their physical unity and Jennings‘ relationship to her parents as she thinks about them. She contemplates over how traditional marriage of her parents has ended up in physical separation and silence as she says: “Silence between them”.

In the first stanza we find them lying in separate beds; he is looking at a book without reading it and she is staring at the ceiling. All the excitement in their lives now has worn out. Everything seems to be routine. The words “lying apart”, “elsewhere” and “separate” suggests the rift that is created between the couple. “She like a girl dreaming of childhood” suggests that she is not happy and wants to be in the past. “Keeping the light on late” and “shadows overheard” shows the contrast between the couple now and before. Neither of them is talking to each other. The book does not interest him and the mother stares at the shadows overheard. Sleeping in separate beds depicts physical distance and a sign of being apart and a lack of communication between them. 

We can feel the desolation and speechlessness which exists in their relationship. But there is still hope left;  they can still able to dream. At the beginning of the second stanza their relationship is described as “flotsam from a former passion”. There is no passion left between them, it is broken into pieces and floating on the surface. Flotsam means wreckage floating in the sea. Here it refers that is all what is left after their passion as a younger couple. Chastity refers to the loss of passion of youth which has now faded from their lives. The stage in their relationship when they touched has passed. The words “confession” and “chastity” are religious and reflect that they keep to their promises even if they are unhappy. They have taken a further step and have reached chastity again. One might suppose that this is a step backwards, but still Jennings describes it as the reaching of “a destination for which their whole lives were a preparation”. 

It is the contrast in their relationship by which we are most interested. The only thing that is shared between them seems to be silence, but mysteriously there is much more left which ties them together. It is the time they have shared, all the common experiences, the difficulties and the beauties of life which lie behind them, it is the familiarity which links them. Their lives are not really separated; because they need each other. The only thing that has happened to them is the fact that they have grown old.

The lines in the third stanza “Strangely part, yet strangely close together, / Silence between them like a thread to hold”. The repetition of the words strangely suggests that the relation is now not as it should be. Their relation is compared to a thread is a simile which suggests weaker connection in old age not strong as youth. The last four lines of the poem are very effective as it says “And not wind in. / And time itself’s a feather/Touching them gently. Do they know they‘re old,/ These two who are my father and mother/ Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?”. This metaphor “And time itself’s a feather” is highly effective  because feather suggests it’s soft, fragile and delicate like their marriage. “Whose fire from which I came” is a metaphor which suggests that they once had a really strong passionate marriage in which their child was born. She ends her poem by asking herself whether they are aware of getting old .The last stanza is full of tenderness and a beautiful image is used when time is compared with a feather, which touches them so gently that they might not even realize it.

The poem shows the growth, fall and change in relationship with age and time. In reality parents or couple ideally cannot be separate. It suggests togetherness and bond but here the body language is contradictory than what it actually should be. The poem sounds heart breaking and depressing. The couple are unhappy.

The poem is written in traditional form. It consists of three stanzas of six lines each. The rhythm is mainly regular and consists, to a large extent, of iambic pentameters, the most common verse form in English poetry. The rhyme scheme is of interest, consisting of two stanzas both rhyming ababba, and the third one rhyming ababab. This underlines the contrast which exists between the first two stanzas and the third one. In the first two stanzas we feel sorry because their relationship does not seem to be as it should be. In the last stanza, however, we are told that their relationship has become like this through time, but this does not necessarily mean a loss of quality. It has simply become different through time. With this poem Jennings successfully creates an image of this couple in the reader‘s mind, and also so provides an interesting exploration of the way relationships develop through time . 

Nobel Prize acceptance speech by Albert Camus: A Summary

Albert Camus’ speech at the Nobel Banquet at the city hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1957.

At the outset of the speech he expresses his immense gratitude towards the academy as they generously honoured him. Obviously, this reward of excellence overcomes all his personal merits and achievements that he gained so far.  He says: “Every man, and for stronger reasons, every artist, wants to be recognized. So do I”. He was of the opinion that artists are needed to be recognized, because they have significant role in order to modify and reform the society. They can influence the human community by creating a movement in their minds.

 

“But I have not been able to learn of your decision without comparing its repercussions to what I really am. A man almost young, rich only in his doubts and with his work still in progress, accustomed to living in the solitude of work or in the retreats of friendship: how would he not feel a kind of panic at hearing the decree that transports him all of a sudden, alone and reduced to himself, to the center of a glaring light? And with what feelings could he accept this honour at a time when other writers in Europe, among them the very greatest, are condemned to silence, and even at a time when the country of his birth is going through unending misery?”

 

He expresses a sense of wonder along with the mixed feelings such as excitement on the one hand and disappointment on the other. As he thinks he was not a deserving person for this award of eminence. Since, he comparatively young and always surrounded by doubts like an average man and still wanders in the path of progression. Moreover, his country was going through unending miseries and hardships.

 

He doesn’t know how to receive this award and how to express his feelings. He feels shock and inner turmoil at hearing this decision of the academy. He reduces to himself and becomes the center of  glaring light. Later, he regains piece from his internal turmoil. Camus wants to say that he exists in the world only because of art. Afterwards, he expresses his notion regarding the nature of art and the role of the writer.

 

“For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them.” He says that he can’t think about a world without art. But, he has never placed an artist above everything. As far as he is concerned an artist is as equal to all other human beings. Even though he became a privileged person from others, he has to admit the fact that he is one among those multitudes, and then only he can maintain his artistic faculties. “And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others.”

 

In fact the writer slightly keeps himself different from the common human community, but he can never articulate the real beauty of art. So, he remains in the midway. Further, he mentions that a true artist shall not judge but understand others. “That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge. And if they have to take sides in this world, they can perhaps side only with that society in which, according to Nietzsche’s great words, not the judge but the creator will rule, whether he be a worker or an intellectual.”

 

Afterwards, he expresses his opinion regarding the role of the writer as he is not free from the difficult duties. “By the same token, the writer’s role is not free from difficult duties. By definition he cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise, he will be alone and deprived of his art.” Writers are not only meant for glorifying those who create history, instead they should write about the abandoned or those who exposed to humiliations. He should transmit his thoughts into words, after all, literature is a means of resounding the silences of the writer. An artist can win the hearts of the people by admitting the fact that ‘the greatness of art lies on Truth and Liberty’. “The two tasks that constitute the greatness of his craft: the service of truth and the service of liberty. Because his task is to unite the greatest possible number of people, his art must not compromise with lies and servitude which, wherever they rule, breed solitude. Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.”

 

Further, he explains the battalion of horrors and sorrows that the generation including Camus witnessed during the periods of wars. But, he has been supported by the commitment to write with truthfully and freely.

 

“These men, who were born at the beginning of the First World War, who were twenty when Hitler came to power and the first revolutionary trials were beginning, who were then confronted as a completion of their education with the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the world of concentration camps, a Europe of torture and prisons – these men must today rear their sons and create their works in a world threatened by nuclear destruction. Nobody, I think, can ask them to be optimists.” These are the snapshot of convulsions of the time. People were exposed to catastrophe. As a result they turned to be  Nihilists (one who believes that life is meaningless and rejects all the religion and moral values as well as principles). But, Europeans in general and Camus in particular refused this notion of Nihilism. As far as an artist is concerned he has to inject optimism to the people through their work of art.

 

Each generation undoubtedly feels a kind of wake up call regarding the reformation of the world. But according to Albert Camus the task was ever greater. It consists of saving the world from destroying itself. The world witnesses extremely catastrophic situation where every good things turned into evil. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold anymore. Technology goes mad, God becomes blind and deaf, and ideologies come to be worn out.  

 

After all, the intelligence debases itself to become the servant of hatred and oppression. Here lies the relevance of the writer, he can resurrect and re-establish which constitute the dignity of life and death. He says that certainly, it is an immense task and gradually it is rising everywhere in the world. Some are even ready to sacrifice their own life for accomplishing the double challenge of truth and liberty. for that generation he should like to pass on his honour. At the same time after having received this honour for his excellence, he puts himself in the right position as he is one among the others.    

 

“He has no other claims but those which he shares with his comrades in arms: vulnerable but obstinate, unjust but impassioned for justice, doing his work without shame or pride in view of everybody, not ceasing to be divided between sorrow and beauty...” He remarks that as a representative of his own comrades, he shares certain qualities significantly, having double existence like at once vulnerable and obstinate and unjust but impassioned for justice etc.

 

After, he expresses his view on truth by saying that it is mysterious and elusive always to be conquered. When it comes to the notion of liberty he says that too much of liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march towards these two commitments resolutely. Once again he emphasizes the idea that to achieve these commitments are double challenging.one has to require strong will power and determination.A writer supposed to have a good conscience and be a preacher of virtue but he pronounces that he was not of that sort. But, he unquestionably supported all those silent men who faced endless dangers and sufferings. He believes that he could provide a ray of hope for them out of his writing.

 

He winds up his word by expressing his immense gratitude again to the gathering. Meanwhile, he shared all his ideologies regarding art and the role of the writer.    

The last call by Andrew Motion: An analysis

The Last Call

Death called me,
I did not hear.
He spoke again:
Come near.

I went to look
for pity.
Poor death, I thought,
he loves me.

I guessed right,
he does.
And now I love him too,
just because.

“All human things are subject to decay, And, when Fate summons, monarchs must obey:” -  Mac Flecknoe

The philosophical dimension of the poem is the inevitability of death, as Claudius says in ‘Hamlet’ that every living thing must taste death. The primary concern of the poet is the truth value rather than the rhetorical aspect. The ‘bare bound’ style of the poem beautifully manifests the intimate emotion that is accepting the last call, Death. As we know right from the birth onwards all the living beings are gradually moving into death.

The poem is noted for its Thanatotic impulse. Sigmund Freud puts the two significant terms such as ‘Eros’ and ‘Thanatos’ in his much celebrated work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. Eros stands for the life instincts, deals with survival, pleasure and reproduction. While Thanatos stands for the death instinct, these instincts are essential for sustaining life. As Freud says “the goal of life is a good death”. Death follows everyone in a quite insidious manner. As the speaker says death loves me that much, as it follows every time, even though I do not love him back. Now it is the time to accompany with him, as my destiny demands. He willingly accepts the universal necessity or the cosmic law by accepting the last call.     

The movement poetry: an overview

The British poetry of the 1950s were marked by the rejection of poetic insight of the previous decade. The process perhaps began with the sarcastic conservatism of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and John Wain who were together at Oxford.  The immense popularity of Dylan Thomas provoked the anger and envy of many of his contemporaries. As a reaction to his ‘excesses’, there began in England a new school of poetry that came to be called as ‘The Movement’. The main spokesmen of which were Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and D.J Enright who voiced their resentment primarily against Dylan Thomas.

 

Robert Conquest who edited the anthology ‘New Lines’ in 1956, was equally vehement against Dylan Thomas. He reacted against the style of him as sentimental and hollow and themes as lack of wisdom and mere nostalgias of childhood.

The origins of movement poetry may be traced to a series of events in the years that followed by the death of Dylan Thomas. There appeared an anonymous article in the Spectator, the purpose of which apparently to ring out the current poetic norms and usher in a new era in poetic fashion. With this aim, the article spoke at length about the changing times and how ,change being the law of life, it is but desirable that literature, too should change accordingly. Literary tastes keep changing, and a new age has its own brand of sensibility which must be expressed in new language.  The Spectator article was simply a harbinger of what was to follow. It prepared a suitable background and suggested that a new generation of writers had now emerged on the literary scene. More suited to the changed world of the fifties. These writers of the new “Movement” thus emerged as a reaction to the older generation of the poets. They were described as taking on a stance antithetical to that of T.S Eliot and his notions as he cultivated a deliberate complexity. The group of poets emerged in the fifties consider the world as materialistic, evil and boring.

Two other events in the following years are important landmarks in the evolution of the new poetic movement. The first was the publication of ‘Poets of the Nineteen Fifties’ by D.J Enright in 1955, and the other was ‘New Lines’, published by Robert Conquest in 1956. These two anthologies together published the work of nine new poets who were considered as Avant Garde, heralding a change in literary taste. Apart from D.J Enright and Robert Conquest, the poets were Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, John Halloway, Elizabeth Jennings, John Wain, Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin. Today when we speak of the “Movement”, we generally refer to this group of loosely linked poets. It is a reactionary movement in the sense that these poets share a mutual dislike for their immediate predecessors in poetry. Their resistance to existing poetic norms holds this assorted group together.

It manifests an outright reaction against T.S Eliot and Ezra Pound. For them, Eliot was a negative influence on literature and something had to be done to counter it. The modernist movement advocated a new way of looking at life, a new form and mode through which to express the sensibility of the age. Larkin and his friend disputed each tenet of modernism. In fact Philip Larkin went to the extent of saying that Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso and Charlie Parker were three villains of the age. What Pound the most influential figure of modern poetry, the unconventional painter Picasso and the controversial modern Jazz saxophonist Parker had in common was the spirit of innovation. Ezra Pound with Eliot, became very much weary of overused poetic modes. Advocated a new way of approaching poetry directly with the minimalistic approach by creating images striking for their clarity and appropriateness.

The Movement poets were mainly antagonistic towards Eliot because much of his work is too clever and too allusive to be understood by the common man. His poetry makes far too many assumptions and too many demands on the reader. It is not meant for relaxation, not suited to leisurely reading. It needs a special kind of audience, not only familiar with the collective mind of Europe, but also aware of the entire history of human kind from ancient times to the contemporary scene. It does not soothe and satisfy the reader into a hushed acceptance of reality.  The appeal of such poetry is inevitably to the minority of readers who are aware of needs other than the physical. Eliot, certainly, is unsuited to the ordinary man whose concerns are generally limited to daily routine and the mundane aspects of existence. A new kind of poetry was the need of the day, so Larkin and his friends were convinced.     

British Poetry from Modern to Postmodern: An Introduction

Modernism marks with its insistent interruption with the immediate past, the nineteenth century Victorian temperament. The elements of impersonality and objectivity seem to be crucial to modernist poets. As the slogan of Ezra Pound suggests ' make it new' was the ultimate aim of modernism. It is considered as an epistemological dominant ; For modernists, it was essential to move away from the personal to the intellectual parlance of human thinking. Thus, a deliberate cultivation of obscurity is discernible in modernist literature in general and poetry in particular.

 

Although the reigning Victorian poetic fashions and standards were challenged from diverse directions, many modern poets were undoubtedly indebted to Browning, Hopkins, Hardy and other late Victorian, 'Fin-de-siecle' (end of the century) poets.

 

When modern poetry broke with the past, the rebellion became particularly visible in the rejection of conventionally embellished and smooth poetic diction, remarkably handled in the works of T.S Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and so on. The debt of Eliot's The Waste Land and Joyce's Ulysses is well known.

 

The point of affinity between Browning and modern poetry lies in his obscurity, irregularity of diction, exploration of Mind (dramatic monologue) and multiple perspective. His celebrated concept Dramatic Monologue can be considered as an anticipation of modern stream of consciousness. Browning's poetic faculty remains a permanent legacy to modern poetry.

 

The poetry of Hardy and Hopkins marked by bold experimentations in tones and modes. Hardy's poetry is characterized by frequent flashes of daring imagination. His experiments orchestrate the use of dialectic words, archaism and 'kennings' (verbal riddles in Anglo Saxon diction). Ultimately his visions are ironic, involving the rapid and unsettling juxtaposition of images and counter perceptions that anticipates modernist techniques.

Hopkins experiments with prosody, that results in much charm and delicacy at the cost of poetic expression. The qualities of 'sprung rhythm' and Anglo Saxon prosody reinforced fresh imagery and compact structure. He was able to revive the 'Metaphysical' mode linking it to modern poetry, this mode was characterized by the cryptic conceit such as the yoking of the contraries and special use of diction. Apart from the contrapuntal play of regular metrical form and irregular speech rhythms, the inter-meshing of 'Inscape' and 'Instress' anticipate the techniques adopted in much modern poetry. These are complementary concepts about individuality and uniqueness. 'Inscape' means the particular features of a certain landscape or other natural structure, which make it different from any other. The theological belief behind this was that God never repeats himself.
'Instress' means the actual experience a reader has of Inscape: how it is received into the sight, memory and imagination. The poet's job is to find images that will ‘nail' the Inscape down for readers, so they can recapture the poet's perception and experience.

 

The Georgians and the war poets:

Georgian poetry emerged in the early decades of 20^th century when king George ruled England. It is a simple and Straightforward in form, largely in the romantic temper. The Georgian poets are neither impressionistic nor pantheistic but “as simple as a child’s reading book”. Their themes were nature, love, leisure, old age, childhood, animals etc. It is poetry for the many and not for the scholarly few alone. It can be enjoyed even by the learned. Georgian poetry has been subjected to severe criticism by critics like T.S. Eliot. These poets include Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas. Brooke was the most popular and typically Georgian, who somewhat ironically, began as a rebel against Victorian gentility with its fondness for vapid sweetness. But like many of his contemporaries, he could not break out of the orderly bounds of liberal humanism. While Edward Thomas's strength lays in nature poetry, which he started to write on the encouragement of Robert Frost, as he meditates on a natural scene and employs a plain idiom.

The trepidation and trauma of the First World War was first expressed by poets in the trenches, challenging patriotic and military hypocrisy; it then coloured the sensibility of an entire age. The war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen increasingly saw the war as an organized and motivated insanity: their poetry witness to the ugly truth seen through the eyes of a common soldier. Both Sassoon and Owen used realism in order to shock readers out of their complacency and exposed the naked reality of dehumanized violence. Thus, war poetry prepared the ground for the modernist poetry of the 1920s.

 

The moment of high modernism(1922):

The high modernist mode was popular in British and American poetry in 1920s was of course dominated by Ezra pound and T.S Eliot. Modernist poetry was characterized by the fragmentary experiences of a complex and heterogeneous civilization. Aestheticism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Imagism, Surrealism, Cubism, Vorticism, Expressionism and Dadaism all combined to produce the modernist mode. The impact of discoveries in psychology and anthropology are conspicuous. Poetry attempts to explore the new territory of the irrational and associative surge of consciousness, neurosis, dream and the collective unconscious with its storehouse of myth and archetype. Pound's wide and disparate reading extended the range of modern poetry, especially in his intertextual use of literary traditions. His concept of Imagism marked by the sharp and brief use of language and he considers poetry is an act of illustration.

T. S Eliot remains the finest practitioner of modern poetry. All the modern features are discernible in his magnum opus The Waste Land (1922). Eliot also focuses on the conservative values and preoccupation with the religious dogma through Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday, stylistically he remains as innovative as ever. After his fairly successful experiments in verse drama, Eliot moved to the more contemplative, somewhat philosophical Four Quartets with its intertwined themes of time, experience, memory, communication and the possibilities of reconciliation. 'Burnt Norton', the first quartet, seems to begin the polyphonic structure with abstract speculation and memories in a rose garden. 'East Coker' is the name of the Somerset village from which Eliot's ancestors had emigrated to America, and the quartet thus takes us to the past. In 'The Dry Salvages' Eliot's own lived past in America is recaptured. 'Little Gidding' is the final poem in the quartets, it discusses time, perspective, humanity, and salvation.

 

The poetry of the thirties:

As we move on to the 1930s, the poets such as W.H Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNiece (known as MacSpaunday / pink poets) turned against their predecessors. The focus shifted out of literary tradition or myth into social and political commitment. "MacSpaunday" was a name invented by  Roy Campbell in his Talking Bronco (1946), to designate a composite figure made up of these four poets. Campbell evaluated that the four were a group of like-minded poets, although they shared little but left-wing views in the broadest sense of the word.

 

The poetry of the Forties:

The forties saw a reaction against the poetry of social reporting and political commitment, in the form of surrealism and neo-romanticism. This New Apocalypse writers focused exclusively on self unravelling. Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet sets the examples for this expressive style marked by mystery, inarticulate terrors and a dream like quality. He extracted an elemental and innovative richness of vocabulary and diction that went much deeper than the concerns of the Auden circle. Thomas and to some extent poets like George Darker and G.S Fraser rejected the self- conscious, intellectualized and ironic style of modernism in favour of an intoxication with words and Gothic effect.

The poetry of the Fifties:

The fifties were marked by the rejection of the poetic tradition of previous decade. The process perhaps began with the sarcastic conservatism of Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and John Wain who were together at Oxford. Robert Conquest's influential anthology, 'New Lines' (1956), brought in six other poets: Elizabeth Jennings, John Holloway, Thom Gunn, D.J Enright, Donald Davie and Conquest himself, Known as 'The Movement Poets'. This body of poetry cultivated elegant lucidity and economy against extravagantly figurative language and shapeless syntax of any kind. In place of theoretical systems and ideology, these poets choose withdrawal from intellectual, public issues; instead of building the unconscious depths they attempted to operate on the register of ordinary and orderly commonsense.

The most accomplished Movement poet, Philip Larkin goes far beyond the manifesto in his use of deflationary rhetoric and teasingly casual irony. As a poet he opened up the territories which previously dismissed with contempt. His poetic fame rests on The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings(1964) and  The High Windows (1974).

 

The poetry of sixties and after:

"The British Poetry Revival" is the general name given to a loose poetry movement in Britain that took place in the 1960s and 1970s. The revival was a modernist-inspired reaction to the Movement's more conservative approach to British poetry. In fact American poetry as we have seen, remained always more innovative and intellectually challenging. For instance, the forties witnessed the emergence of a new generation of poets in America whose influence extended fruitfully to the British poets of the sixties. The most important of these American poets were Robert Lowell and John Berryman along with their contemporaries and successors such as Elizabeth Bishop, Theodore Roethke, Anne sexton and Sylvia Plath. Lowell began the tradition of 'confessional poetry', which directly influenced Sexton and Plath.

Sylvia plath, a legatee of 'confessional' tradition, settled in England after her marriage to Ted Hughes. She wrote primarily out of the influence of strange terror and despair. She was able to observe and analyze with unflinching honesty of her imprisoned psyche and explores the surreal landscapes of the mind.

The British poets of the sixties were exposed not only to American confessional poetry but also to the freewheeling and open structured verse of the 'Beat' movement. The resulting enlargement of poetic vision is seen in Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn. Violence is rampant in Ted Hughes, he represents and reframes the poetic visions of animal world, also approximates to a Beckett  like grim and sardonic insights in his language. Like Hughes, Thom Gunn's poetic arrival was also explosive. We encounter a reckless immersion of energy and cautious wisdom in his poems. The poetry that he produced under the influence of hallucinatory drugs only intermittently achieves a surreal insight. This weakening of poetic control is reflected in his later poetry where his honesty is diluted by sentimental nostalgia.

Among his contemporaries, Geoffrey Hill seems to strike a different note by virtue of his religious preoccupation. He presents the history and memory of  Europe through a dense intertextuality.